Imperia Online International

Hi, is it possible to swap your capital to a poor production province get a big loan wait for the payments to finish then swap your capital back to your old one thus leaving one province in massive negative gold. If so if you do it a second time the nagative gold would eat into your new loan amount. is my understanding correct.

yes but problem is you would then have to pay that loan back and once a provence goes over a certian amount of debt you can't move army or research or build anything. Or so i have read. I have never had it happen to me so can't say from experience.

Samiboy gave you good answer. I also can't remember what's the limit before your province is blocked. I think it's something like 1 milion but i could be very wrong. Search on forum i'm sure there is an answer. Of course you understand that province you choose to be capital would be blocked for veeeeeeery long time if you take big loan.

But there is one trick. You can be for example 4 millions in negative gold and still your economy wouldn't block for as long as you have enough gold in other provinces (let's say 3.5 millions)

By the way capital is only useful for taking loan and i see no reason why you would return your capitol from province in negative gold except to take another loan  *hihi*

limit is -5 million  *rose*

Just want to make sure I have understood this correctly because it's the first time I've seen it.

As I understand, what has been said is:  If the debt in any one province goes above 5 million then one cannot conduct research, construct buildings or move army (or launch attacks?) from any other province in the Empire.  Is that correct?

If so, it seems sensible but should be set out clearly in the laws of the game.

its a very good strategy at the beginning of the game, but you must be smart which province you want to sacrifice. you take the loans and maintain the negative balance under 5 million, do huge research and colonize at least 6 more provinces so the one that is negative wouldnt hinder your progress. then when your economy is strong and your production high, especially focusing in wood and stone, you pay the negative and develop the sacrificed province. that way you benefit from the loan to make you fly, and you pay when it hurts your economy the least.

you are right. I agree is very good thing. I think it is written in rules somewhere or quite a few old threads is how I knew of it was from old threads I read. I don't use loans. (well except for when I sold over 200k wood by mistake for 75 gold each. *hihi* in first month of era. Had to take loan then to move my army. *sos*)

yes - a good tactic if you feel that way inclined. you can of course take the loan, switch your capital to pay it of and when ready to take another loan switch the capital back to where you want the gold placed and when you have it switch the capital back to your negative province, nothing wrong with that, and that is i imagine why they hve the 5 million limit or we all be doing it permanantely lol

This rule is born not because of bank loans  *pardon*

In fact this rule was firstly used, because many farmers started to hire a lot of trebuchets and move them to a single province. Looking that sieges don't need army save, they were happy not to do nothing more in that province, but simply used it to pay upkeep of sieges army. Of course balance of that province always went to negative, but in general, they (farmers) were not paying upkeep at all, considering their game as they were playing without 1 province. Looking that generally they had 10 in 4 months realm, it was easy to understand this was very profitable... Habing so much army networth without paying upkeep and practically indestructible.

This was the reason why IO put a rule where the total gold balance can't be less than -5 million, or you will not be able to construct or research anything...  *ok*

Hmm..  all interesting stuff - thank you

A couple of follow ups if I may - especially for blackdeath.

Firstly I think this could be an excellent economic strategy and entirely valid - after all most western economies post-war economic growth was fuelled by Keynsian debt financing. Trick I guess is to avoid what happened to heavily debt burdened African economies after the nightmare of monetarism was introduced by Reagan, Thatcher and other neanderthals.  Also like samyoboy I've not yet taken a loan: I have always regarded it as a form of insurance in case my army comes back to a province with negative gold and I was under attack.

So

1. are we sure about the levels?  That is to say do we know that other provinces will be unaffected by the debt level until the debt in the province reaches 5 million?

2. is there an offset i.e. do the asset balances in the other provinces counter balance the debt in the selected debt bearing province?  I know I wouldn't be able to build or research from that province and that there would be little point in building barracks there but I would hate to be unable to move my armies around and launch attacks from other provinces

3. are we sure that the rules won't suddenly be changed?  Imagine if the level suddenly dropped to 2 million - if the debt level in the province was at 4.5 million then everything would be royally fucked.

4. as I understand it you can take as many loans in an era as you want but only one at a time.  So, presumably the best thing is to take a small loan (to minimise interest) every week?

5. Presumably for this strategy to work really effectively you have to get university levels as high as possible as soon as possible?

Couple of other questions I forgot  :-[

1.  why produce wood and stone in particular?  I hardly ever invest in stone as I don't think forts have any use apart from the marginal one of increasing production and surely iron always gets a better return than stone?
2.  Blackdeath - is your strategy largely economic?  Personally I'd prefer to get my military researches done first ie so I can get elites as soon as possible and smack up mil acad so I can launch 8 or 9 attacks a day.  Or am I missing something fundamental?

wood 0.6 gold each, iron 3.1 gold each stone 1thats the prices in r50

Apologies blackdeath - just seen your sig and it's clear that you're a warrior.  In which case I'm even more curious why you advocate researching centralisation rather than military

centraliation is good early in the game to get a decent economy on the go, the very good players that last the era tend to stick to economy building until around 15000 points when they start to automatically unload resources being transported between provinces and therefore 'hidden', getting the cent early allows those provinces to grow, even when pilaged you cant stop good growth with high levels of medicine, LATER in the game the focus changes to military but by then they have very good inome to support vast armies and continue researches. I have played as a ruthless pillager/warrior and general pain in the arse strategy from very early only to suddently be dominated by superior firepower later in the game. all depends on realm rules and length as to what strategy to best adopt

@addis..... first of all, the debt is counter balanced by the gold in your other provinces, secondly, i stress on wood and stone production especially in the beginning of the era to maximise use of workers. if you go to produce iron you will find that all your workers are in a hole digging iron while your economy suffers. I am speaking about economy addis, i am a serious warrior but all warlords who are successful needs to have something to support them. i realised that with v4a you need a strong economy if you wish to be a killer, i played last era like i played in v4, big mistake. i was killing and killing but with the new trade system the enemies/victims hid their resources, so if you dont have resources to fuel your army you are screwed. so my new strategy is do develop economy for the first 90 days then use that as a base for my military developement. the era has 68 days or something like that and i did 9 provinces, now i can develop my elites faster.

There are seriously fckd up shit written in here:

1-
Dude, u cannot change capital while on a loan !!!

2-
What kind off fckd up strategy is that ??? Why take loans if your gonna pay them anyways !!!! *hahaha* Are you from Africa or something?

@hrdevil 1. you can change your capital at any time, the only time that you cannot change it is while researching  university, obviously  you cant read. 2. you pay the loan when your ecxonomy is strong enough so that you dont get affected. in the beginning if you try to repay the loan, your game is stuck for 7 days paying it, if you wait 60 days, with 8 preovinces you can pay it with 3 days production, so you obviously wont get as affected as one week. or in that time you can pay it from simple attacks on your neighbors.

well i tried it and sincerly i regret.... coz i had army and couple of days later i could have got the money needed, so unless ura farmer with 0 soldiers that strategy aint worth scarificing a province, i got an extra province and was able to box but it slowed me down for a good time,and after it i got another province by attacking

"cant change your capital while have aloan" - HRDevil

maybe it depends on realm, but you can and i have so poke it  :P :P

Besides all moderm economic strategies (which i'm aware  *freak* ), You should understand that IO loan works as feudalism loan. It mean that is not 15% year (or week in our case), but is from 50 to 150%. And that is normal, because we are speaking about medieval age, when this was normal.

I have used many times bank loans, but i know this is only because i'm lazy, and not only because is the best strategy... indeed is the worst.

P.S.
You can change capital at any moment...

its not the best strategy because if you dont know how to do 8 provinces in record time then you are screwed. i use it bcause it works just fine for me.

For Ploppy

If you have any chance of NOT taking the loan than don't do it. Interest is a killer and when you count up all interest you paid you will see you lost a lot.

Yes you develop "fast" initially but if you don't know what you are doing (or learning how to play the game) you will learn the hard way that loan cost you dearly.

First your province where you pay the loan is blocked for loooooong time if you take few loans (so not developing at all)

Second if you take 700k for example you will pay around 1.2 millions if you take small loan, for medium loan you will give 1.4 and for large 2.1 million. This gold HAVE to come from somewhere so you wold be selling resources to pay it sooner or later

Third since you will be selling resources anyway it's much better (if you can) to collect enough resources and sell it so you would have needed gold for research without taking loan.

I'm playing in R50 and have 8 provinces (no 9 coming soon). Not once i took a loan to research new province but i took a loan 2 times to boost my economy. Loans are good in some cases but taking them over and over again i think is mistake.

Also i have army and i pay upkeep for it but i use that army wisely. First i use it to defend my resources and second i use it to take gold from noobs.

And finally i read you wrote forts are stupid and don't give much of benefit. You are VERY wrong with that. It's almost like saying bureaucracy is useless.

From the above comments as far as I can see it's a risky but valid strategy.

It seems to turn on whether or not (from blackdeath's comments) you know how to develop 6 or more provinces very quickly.  I imagine this would depend on firstly having a high university level and being able to persuade your leader that you should hold the researcher position for a relatively long time.  I think that would be a tough ask for a leader to grant given that everyone wants the researcher position in the early to mid stages.  I may, however, be missing something and if blackdeath were prepared to say more I'd be very grateful.  Would also welcome any comments on whether or not it would be equally valid to instead invest in military research (mellee, armour, mil acad, tactics etc etc) and then use the army to secure resources through war income to invest in economic research later.

@ dupecmar: About forts: it was me, not Ploppy, who suggested that they were largely worthless except for marginal economic gains (+10% production, storage capacity and a couple of other minor ones).  I prefer to use a warrior rather than farming strategy and my experience in two eras in realm 25 is that forts are largely useless in defence.  Opened a topic on this sometime ago see:

http://forum.imperiaonline.org/int/index.php?topic=14739.0

More than happy to receive more comments on this :)

Btw Tarantio I know your comment below was probably a joke


But it is in bad taste. I have lived and worked in Africa for 14 out of the last twenty years and even when back in the UK was travelling to Africa 3 months out of each year.  The reason why African nations faced major debt crises was because of the malevolent idiocy of Reagan and Thatcher in adopting neanderthal policies advocated by that odious dwarf Friedman so that they could drive up interest rates and hence unemployment in western economies so as to weaken organised labour and let their rich friends drive up their profits at the expense of working peoples' wages.  The increased interest rates also hit Africa which had been using exactly the same Keynsian strategies that benefitted developed economies in the post war period.

It was western greed and malevolence that caused the African crisis not mistaken policy decisions in Africa.

@addis..... i will say more because you are interested, now if you ask dupecmar, he will tell you that for me the strategy works, he is my neighbor and he sees my developement. i am the leader in my alliance addis so researcher position has nothing to do with it. its all about careful planning. now as i mentioned about the wood and stone, its imperative that in the beginning you focus on those resources. centralisation is mainly composed of those two. small iron production is needed. many players disagree, but i do the math, ifyou have 50K population in province 8 right, and you put lets say the majority in iron, you still cant ever produce a huge quantity, now if you put the same amount of workers in stone and wood you will see that they produce double the amout, these resources also have a faster rate of turnover on the market. these benefits help you to centralise and develop faster. hence giving you in 68 days 9 provinces my friend. and a fort 7 by the way. just dont waste time doing troops it practically sucks your resources, its a big help by the way if you can be online all the time so attacks will never slow you down, also 1200 credits is a big boost in those 68 days. ah, big thing is to have your architecture and university at level 16 very fast, with high wood and stone production thats a piece of cake. then little by little you start upgrading them one at a time, they are now cycle researches so they both affect each other`s price and time.

Well depends how do you look at your forts. If you look at forts as your main "defense" than you are right. They are useless especially later in the game. BUT right now (little bit more than a month into the game) fort is more than enough to defend your resources. I have A LOT of farmers around me and i just can't touch them right now.

High fort levels on boxed provinces mean i have to build A LOT of trebs spending A LOT of resources. I did quick calculation and realized that it's not cost effective now to attack farmers. It's too expensive to build enough trebs and than i have to deal with damn high upkeep. Almost all gold that i could win i would be spending on upkeep.

But since i'm warrior type of player i know that later in the game fort is good ONLY for 10% economy boost and trust me it's not worthless. Just do calculation between for province production with fort lvl 1 and fort lvl 5.


He he he, blackdeath and me have different strategies but almost same development. So basically if you know what you are doing any strategy is good *hihi*

this had me going, couldnt recall writing that? *pardon* *pardon*

""Btw Tarantio I know your comment below was probably a joke

Quote
What kind off fckd up strategy is that  Why take loans if your gonna pay them anyways !!!!  Are you from Africa or something?""

AddisMakem  *stop* please read the thread again  *ok*

It is a joke and your taking credit for the good ones  :rant:

not taking credit, pointing out it wasnt me

Tarantio - I'm so sorry, mega apologies  :-[

But HrDevil it is a bloody poor joke.